“No philosopher and hardly any novelist has ever managed to
explain what that weird stuff, human consciousness, is really made of. Body,
external objects, darty memories, warm fantasies, other minds, guilt, fear,
hesitation, lies, glees, doles, breath-taking pains, a thousand things which
words can only fumble at, co-exist, many fused together in a single unit of
consciousness”— Iris
Murdoch, in The Black Prince. 1973.

What kinds of
creatures have consciousness? Does it
exist in chimpanzees—or in gorillas, baboons, or orangutans?
What about dolphins or elephants? Are frogs, fish, insects, or vegetables
aware of themselves to any extent—or is consciousness a singular trait that
segregates us from the rest of the beasts?

Although those
animals won’t answer questions like, “Are you aware that you exist,” or “ What is your view of what
consciousness is,” the
answers from people are scarcely more useful. When you ask mystical thinkers how consciousness works, their replies are not highly enlightening.

Sri Chinmoy: “Consciousness is the inner spark or inner link in
us, the golden link within us that connects our highest and most illumined part
with our lowest and most unillumined part.”[1]

Some philosophers
even insist that there’s no way to look for good answers to this.

Jerry Fodor: "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything
material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have
the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for
the philosophy of consciousness."[2]

Is consciousness an
‘all-or-none’ trait that has a clear-cut boundary, or does it have different amounts
and qualities—the way that a thing can be cold or hot?

Relativist: Everything has some consciousness. An atom has only
a little of it. Bigger things must have it in larger degrees—right up to the stars and the
galaxies.

Absolutist: We don’t know where consciousness starts and stops,
but clearly each thing must be conscious or not—and, clearly, there is no such
thing in a rock.

Computer User: Certain programs seem to me already conscious to
some small degree.

Logicist: Before you go on about consciousness, you really
ought to define it. Good arguments should start right out by stating precisely
what they are about. Otherwise, you'll build on a shaky foundation.

That policy might seem 'logical'—but it’s wrong when it comes to
psychology, because it assumes
that ‘consciousness’ has a clear and definite meaning. Of course, we don't like to be imprecise—but strict definitions can make things
worse, until we’re sure that our ideas are
right. For, 'consciousness’ is a word we use for many types of processes, and
for different kinds of purposes;we
apply it to feelings, emotions, and thoughts—and to
how we think and feel about them. It’s the same for most everyday words
about minds, such as ‘creativity’ or ‘intelligence’.

So instead of asking what ‘consciousness’
is, or what we mean by ‘being
aware,’ we’ll try to examine when and
why people use those mysterious words. But why do such questions even arise? What, for that
matter, are mysteries?

Daniel
Dennett: “A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think
about—yet. Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
There have been other great mysteries [like those] of the origin of the
universe and of time, space, and gravity. ... However, Consciousness stands
alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers
tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are
many who insist—and hope—that there will never be a demystification of
consciousness.” —Consciousness Explained, 1991

Indeed, many of those who
‘insist—and hope’ that consciousness cannot be explained still claim that it
alone is the source of most of the virtues of human minds.

Thinker 1: Consciousness is what unifies our present, past, and
future together, by making sense of all our experience.

Thinker 2: Consciousness makes us 'aware' of ourselves, and
gives us our sense of identity; it is what
animates our minds and gives us our sense of being alive.

Thinker 3: Consciousness
is what gives things meanings to us; without it, we would not even know we had
feelings.

Wow! How could
one principle, power, or force endow us with so many faculties? It can’t—and this chapter will argue that there is no
reason to suppose that all of those different
abilities stem from just one common origin. Indeed, from what we know about
brains, it is safer to guess that they’re each based on different machinery.

William Calvin and George Ojeman “Modern discussions of
consciousness … usually include such aspects of mental life as focusing your
attention, things that you didn't know you knew, mental rehearsal, imagery,
thinking, decision making, awareness, altered states of consciousness,
voluntary actions, subliminal priming, the development of the concept of self
in children, and the narratives we tell ourselves when awake or dreaming.”[3]

All this shows that
"consciousness" does not refer to any single idea or thing, but that
we use it as a suitcase-word for a great many different activities.

Aaron Sloman: “It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain
it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there's no one thing
for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many
sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g. different kinds of
perception, learning, knowledge, attention control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc."[4]

To see the
variety of what human minds do, consider this fragment of everyday thinking.

Joan is part way across the street on the way to deliver her
finished report. While thinking about what to say at the meeting, she hears a
sound and turns her head —and sees a quickly oncoming car. Uncertain whether
to cross or retreat, but uneasy about arriving late, she decides to sprint
across the road. She later remembers her injured knee and reflects upon her
impulsive decision. “If my knee had failed, I could have been killed. Then
what would my friends have thought of me?”

It might seem
natural to ask, "How conscious was Joan of what she did?" But rather than dwell on that ‘consciousness’ word, let’s look at a few of the things
that Joan “did.”

Reaction: Joan reacted quickly to that sound.

Identification: She recognized it as being a sound.

Characterization: She classified it as the sound of a car.

Attention: She noticed certain things rather than others.

Imagining: She envisioned two or more possible futures.

Indecision: She wondered whether to cross or retreat.

Decision: She chose one of several alternative actions.

Recollection:
She retrieved descriptions of prior events.

Reconsideration: Later she reconsidered this choice.

Selection: She selected a way to choose among options.

Apprehension: She was uneasy about arriving late.

Planning: She constructed a multi-step action-plan.

Embodiment: She tried to describe her body's condition.

Emotion: She changed major parts of her mental state.

Representation: She interconnected a set of descriptions.

Language: She constructed several verbal expressions.

Narration:
She heard them as dialogs in her mind.

Anticipation: She expected certain future condition.

Intention: She changed some of her goals’ priorities.

Reasoning: She made various kinds of inferences.

Reflection: She thought about what she’s recently done.
Self-Reflection: She reflected on her recent thoughts.

Empathy: She imagined other persons’ thoughts.

Moral Reflection: She evaluated what she has done.

Self-Imaging: She made and used models of herself.

Self-Awareness: She characterized her mental condition.

Sense
of Identity: She regarded herself as an entity.

That’s only the start of a much longer
list of aspects of how we feel and think—and if we want to understand how our
minds work, we’ll need explanations for all of them. To do this, we’ll have to
take each one apart, to account for the details of how they each work. Then
each reader can decide which ones should, or should not be regarded as aspects
of ‘consciousness.’

Holist: Yet after you analyze all those parts, you will still
be obliged to explain how they all unite to produce the streams of
consciousness that emerge from them. So, then you still will need some words
to describe that entire phenomenon.

Why did our
language come to include such terms as ‘awareness,’ ‘perception,’
‘consciousness,’ every one of which condenses many different processes?

Psychologist: Such self-words are useful in everyday social
life because they help us to communicate—both with our friends and with
ourselves. For, because we all share the same kinds of jumbled ideas, we can
pack them into vague suitcase-terms that seem easy for us to understand.

Ethicist: We need them also to support our principle of
responsibility and discipline. Our legal and ethical principles are largely
based on the idea that we ought to punish or reward only actions that are
‘intentional’—that is, are based on having been planned in advance, with
predictions about their consequences.

Psychiatrist: Perhaps we use those suitcase terms to keep
ourselves from asking too much about how out minds control themselves, and what
underlies the decisions we make. Perhaps we use words like “consciousness” to
help us suppress all those questions all at once—by suggesting that all of them
are just a single big Mystery.

Student: If “ consciousness” is just a suitcase word, what
makes it seem so clear to us that we actually possess such a thing? If such
terms keep shifting their meanings, why doesn't this become evident whenever we
start to think about them?

That could be
because no part of a mind can ‘see’ much of what the rest of that mind does. A
typical resource inside a brain accomplishes its jobs internally, in ways that
other resources cannot perceive. Also, when any resource probes into another,
that very act may change the other’s state—and thus scramble the very evidence
it would need to recognize what’s happening. These could partly account for
Hume’s complaint that our minds lack good ways to inspect themselves.

David Hume: “The motion of our body
follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious.
But the means, by which this is effected; the energy, by which the will
performs so extraordinary an operation; of this we are so far from being
immediately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent enquiry.”[5]

Hume assumes that
we could never develop more powerful ways to inspect ourselves—but today we
have new image-machines that show more of what happens inside our brains. For
example, now we can detect activities that start before our limbs begin to
move.

Dualist philosopher: Still, those
instruments will eventually fail, because you can measure a brain but not an
idea. Some creatures are conscious, while others are not—and consciousness is a
subjective thing that can’t be explained in physical terms.

Functionalist Philosopher: What evidence could support your
faith that consciousness could never be explained? We can see it simply as our
name for what happens when certain processes run in our brains.

I would agree
with that second opinion, except that we also need to say more about what those
'certain processes' do—and
why we distinguish them as a group. ((The next section will offer a theory of
this.) Still, many thinkers still maintain that brains must be based on
something beyond the reach of our present-day machines.

Emergentist: Perhaps consciousness is just one of those
‘wholes’ that emerge when systems get complex enough. Perhaps that’s just what
we should expect from the network of billions of cells in a brain.

When we increase
a system’s size, then it will usually work less well, unless we also improve
its design, and that always involves some
compromise; if a system is built with too many connections, this will lead to
traffic jams—while if the connections between its parts are too sparse, it is
unlikely to anything useful at all.

Besides, if mere
complexity were all it needs, then almost
everything would have consciousness. We don’t want to conclude that
water-waves think—yet the manner in which a wave breaks on a beach is more
complex (at least in some ways) than the processes that go on in our brains.

So, there's no
point to asking what consciousness ‘is’—because we’ve seen that this is a
suitcase word, which we each fill up with far more stuff than could possibly
have just one common cause. It makes no sense to try to discuss so many
different things at once—except when trying to explain why we tend to treat all
those things as the same. Let’s listen to Aaron Sloman again:

Aaron Sloman: “I for one, do not think defining consciousness
is important at all, and I believe that it diverts attention from important and
difficult problems. The whole idea is based on a fundamental misconception
that just because there is a noun "consciousness" there is some
‘thing’ like magnetism or electricity or pressure or temperature, and that it's
worth looking for correlates of that thing. Or on the misconception that it is
worth trying to prove that certain mechanisms can or cannot produce ‘it’, or
trying to find out how ‘it’ evolved, or trying to find out which animals have
‘it’, or trying to decide at which moment ‘it’ starts when a fetus develops, or
at which moment ‘it’ stops when brain death occurs, etc. There will not be one
thing to be correlated but a very large collection of very different things.”[6]

I completely
agree with Sloman’s view. To understand how our thinking works, we must study
those “very different things” and then ask what kinds of machinery could accomplish some or all
of them. In other words, we must try to design—as opposed to define—machines that can do what our minds can
do.

Student: You still did not answer my question on why, if “consciousness” is just a suitcase
word, what makes it seem like such a definite thing.

Here is a theory
of why that could happen: Most of our mental activities run more or less
‘unconsciously’—in the sense that we’re barely aware of them. But when we encounter obstacles, this starts up some
high-level processes that have some properties like these:

(1) They make use of our most recent
memories.

(2) They operate more serially, than in parallel.

(3) They use abstract, symbolic, or verbal
descriptions

(4) They use models that we have made of ourselves.

Now suppose that a brain
could construct a resource called C that detects when all these are running at once:

If such a C-detector turned out to be useful enough,
this could lead us to imagine that it detects the presence of some sort of
‘Consciousness-Thing!’ Indeed, we might even imagine that entity to be the cause of that set of activities, and our
language systems might learn to connect this kind of detector to terms like
‘awareness,’ ‘myself,’ ‘attention,’ or ‘Me’. To see how this might be useful
to us, let’s examine its four constituents.

Recent Memories: Why must consciousness involve memory? I’ve
always thought of consciousness as about the present, not the past—about what’s
happening right now.

For any mind (or
any machine) to know what it has done, it needs some records of recent
activities. For example, suppose that I
asked, “Are you aware that you're touching your ear?” Then you might reply,"Yes, I'm aware that I am doing that." However, for you to make a statement like that,
your language resources must be reacting to signals from other parts of your
brain, which in turn have reacted to prior events. So, whatever you say (or
think) about yourself, it takes time to collect that evidence.

More generally,
this means that a brain cannot think about what it is thinking right now; the best it could do is to contemplate some records
of some of its recent
activities. There is no reason why some part of a brain could not
think about what it has seen of the activities of other parts—but even
then, there always will be at least so small delay in between.

Serial Processes. Why
should our high-level processes tend to be more serial? Would it not be more
efficient for us to do more things in parallel?

Most of the time in your everyday life, you do many things simultaneously; you have no
trouble, all at once, to walk, talk, see, and scratch your ear. But few can do
a passable job at drawing a circle and square at once by using both of their
hands.

Citizen: Perhaps each of those two particular tasks demands so
much of your attention that you can’t concentrate on the other one.

That would make sense if you assume that attention is some sort of
thing that comes in limited quantities—but then we would need a theory about
what might impose this kind of limitation, yet still can walk, talk and see all
at once. One explanation of this could be that such limits
appear when resources conflict. For, suppose that
two tasks are so similar that they both need to use
the same mental resources. Then if we try to do both jobs at once, one of them will be forced
to stop—and the more such conflicts arise in our brains, the fewer such jobs we
can do simultaneously.

Then why can we see, walk,
and talk all at once? This presumably happens because our brains contain
substantially separate systems for these—located in different parts of the
brain—so that their resources don’t conflict so often. However, when we have to
solve a problem that’s highly complex then we usually have only one recourse: somehow
to break it up into several parts—each of which may
require some high-level planning and thinking. For example each of those
subgoals might require us to develop one or more little ‘theories’ about the
situation—and then do some mental experiments to see if these are plausible.

Why can’t we do all this simultaneously? One reason for
this could simply be that our resources for making and using plans has only
evolved rather recently—that is, in only a few million years—and so, we do not
yet have multiple copies of them. In other words, we don’t yet much capacity at
our highest levels of ‘management’—for example, resources for keeping track of
what’s left to be done and for finding ways to achieve those goals without
causing too many internal conflicts. Also, our processes for doing such things
are likely to use the kinds of symbolic descriptions discussed below—and those
resources are limited too. If so, then our only option will be to focus on
each of those goals sequentially.[7]

This sort of
mutual exclusiveness could be a principle reason why we sometimes describe our
thoughts as flowing in a
‘stream of consciousness’—or as taking the form of an ‘inner
monologue’—a process in
which a sequence of thoughts seems to resemble a story or narrative. [8] When our resources are limited, we may
have no alternative to the rather slow ‘serial processing’ that so frequently
is a prominent feature of what we call “high-level thinking.”[9]

Symbolic Descriptions:Why would we need to use symbols or
words rather than, say, direct connections between cells in the brain?

Many researchers
have developed schemes for learning from experience, by making and changing
connections between various parts of systems called ‘neural networks’ or
‘connectionist learning machines.’[10] Such systems have proved to be able for
learning to recognize various kinds of patterns—and it seems quite likely that
such low-level processes could underlie most of the functions inside our
brains.[11] However,
although such systems are very useful at doing many useful kinds of jobs, they
cannot fulfill the needs of more reflective tasks, because they store
information in the form numerical values that are hard for other resources to
use. One can try to interpret these numbers as correlations or likelihoods,
but they carry no other clues about what those links might otherwise signify.
In other words, such represesntations don’t have much expressiveness. For
example, a small such neural network might look like this.

In contrast, the
diagram below shows what we call a “Semantic Network”that represents some of
the relationships between the parts of a three-block Arch. For example, each
link that points to the concept supports could be used to predict that the top block would fall if
we removed a block that supports it.

Thus, whereas a ‘connectionist network’ shows only the ‘strength’ of each of
those relations, and says nothing about those relations themselves, the
three-way links of Semantic Networks can be used for many kinds of reasoning.

Self-Models:Why did you
include ‘Self-Models’ among the processes in your first diagram?

When Joan was
thinking about what she had done, she asked
herself, “What would my friends have thought of me.” But the only way she could answer such questions
would be to use some descriptions or models that
represent her friends and herself. Some of Joan's models of herself will be
descriptions of her physical body, others will represent some of her goals, and
yet others depict her dispositions in various social and physical contexts.
Eventually we build additional structures include collections of stories about
our own pasts, ways to describe our mental states, bodies of knowledge about
our capacities, and depiction of our acquaintances. Chapter §9 will further
discuss how we make and use ‘models’ of ourselves.

Once Joan possesses a set of
such models, she can use them to think self-reflectively—and she’ll feel that
she’s thinking about herself. If those reflections
lead to some choices she makes, then Joan may feel that she is in 'control of
herself”—and perhaps apply the term 'conscious' to this. As for her other
processes, if she suspects that they exist at all, she may represent them as
beyond her control and call them 'unconscious' or ‘unintentional.' And
once we provide machines with such structures, perhaps
they, too, will learn to make statements like, “I feel sure that you know
just what I mean when I speak about ‘mental experiences.’

I don’t mean to
insist that ‘detectors’ like these must be involved in all of the processes
that we call consciousness. However, without some ways to recognize these
particular patterns of mental conditions, we might not be able to talk about
them!

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

This section began with some ideas about what we recognize
when we talk about consciousness, and we suggested that this might relate to
detecting some set of high-level activities.

However, we also
ought to ask what might cause us to start up such sets of activities. This could be
done in the opposite way: suppose among Joan’s resources are some
Trouble-Detectors’ or ‘Critics’ that detect when her thinking has got into
trouble—for example, when she fails to achieve some important goal, or to
overcome some obstacle. In such a condition, Joan might describe her state in
terms of distress or frustration, and try to remedy this by a mental act that,
expressed in words, might be “Now I should make myself concentrate.” Then she could try to switch to some way
to think that engages more high-level processes—for example, by activating set
of resources like these:

This suggests
that we sometimes use ‘conscious’ to refer to activities that initiate rather than recognize sets of higher-level processes.

Student: How did you choose those particular features for your
scheme to decide when to use words like ‘consciousness?’ Surely, since this is
a suitcase-word, each person might make a different such list.

Indeed, just as
we have multiple meanings for most of our other psychology-words, we’re likely
to switch among different such feature-lists whenever we use words like
‘consciousness.’

The paradox of consciousness—that the more consciousness
one has, the more layers of processing divide one from the world—is, like so
much else in nature, a trade-off. Progressive distancing from the external
world is simply the price that is paid for knowing anything about the world at
all. The deeper and broader [our] consciousness of the world becomes, the more
complex the layers of processing necessary to obtain that consciousness. —
Derek Bickerton, Language and Species, 1990

When you enter a
room you have the sense that you instantly see all the things in your view.
However, this is an illusion because it will take time to recognize the objects
that are actually there; then you’ll have to revise many wrong first
impressions. Nevertheless, all this proceeds so quickly and smoothly that this
requires an explanation—and we’ll propose one later in §8-3 Panalogy.

The same thing happens inside
one’s mind. We usually have a constant sense that we’re ‘conscious’ of things that are happening now.
But when we examine this critically, we recognize that there must be something
wrong with it—because nothing exceeds the speed of light. This means that no
internal part of a brain can ever know exactly what is happening “now”—either in the
outside world or in any other part of that brain. The most that
any resource can know is some of what happened in the recent past.

Citizen:
Then why does it seem to me that I am conscious of all sorts of sights and
sounds, and of feeling my body moving around—right at this very moment of time?
Why do all those perceptions seem to come to me instantaneously?

It makes good
sense, in everyday life, to assume
that everything we see is "present" in the here and now, and it normally
does no harm to suppose that we are in constant contact with the
outside world. However, I’ll argue that this illusion results from the
marvelous ways that our mental resources are organized—and I think this
phenomenon needs a name:

The
Immanence Illusion:For most of the questions you would otherwise ask, some
answers will have already arrived before the higher levels of your mind have
had enough time to ask for them.

In other words,
if some data you need were already retrieved before you recognized that you
needed it, you will get the impression of knowing it instantaneously—as though
no other processes intervened.[12]

For example,
before you enter a familiar room, it is likely that you have already retrieved
an old description of it, and it may be quite some time before you notice that
some things have been changed; the idea that one exists in the present
moment may be
indispensable in everyday life—but much what we think that we see are the
stereotypes of what we expected.

Some claim that it would be wonderful to be constantly aware of
all that is happening. But the more often your high-level mental resources
change their views of reality, the harder it will be for them to find
significance in what they sense. The power of our high-level descriptions comes not from
changing ceaselessly, but from having enough stability.

In other words, for us to
sense what persists through time, one must be able to examine and compare
descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, not
because of it. Our sense of constant contact with the world is a form of the
Immanence Illusion: it comes when every question asked about something is
answered before we know it was asked—as though those answers were already
there.[13]

In Chapter §6 we’ll also see how our ways to activate knowledge
before we need it could explain why our ‘commonsense knowledge’ seems ‘obvious.

“Our mind is so fortunately equipped that it brings us the most
important bases for our thoughts without our having the least knowledge of this
work of elaboration. Only the results of it become conscious. This unconscious
mind is for us like an unknown being who creates and produces for us, and
finally throws the ripe fruits in our lap.” —Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

Why has
Consciousness' seemed such a mystery? I'll argue that this is largely because we
exaggerate our perceptiveness. For example, at any one moment the lens of your eye can clearly focus only on objects in a
limited distance range, while everything else will be blurry.

Citizen: That doesn’t seem to apply to me, because all the
objects that I can see seem clearly focused all at once.

You can see that
this is an illusion, if you focus your eyes on your fingertip while trying to
read a distant sign. Then you’ll see
a pair of those signs at once, but both will be too blurry to read. Until we do such experiments, we think we see
everything clearly at once, because the lens in each eye so quickly adjusts
that we have no sense that it’s doing this. Similarly, most people believe
they see, at once all the colors of things in a scene—yet a simple experiment
will show that we only see colors of things in the field near the object you’re
looking at.

Both of these are instances
of that Immanence Illusion, because you eyes so quickly turn to see whatever
attracts your attention. And I claim that the same applies to consciousness;
we make almost the same kinds of mistakes about how much we can ‘see’ inside
our own minds.

Patrick
Hayes: "Imagine what it would be like to be
conscious of the processes by which we generate imagined (or real) speech. …
[Then] a simple act like 'thinking of a name', say, would become a complex and
skilled deployment of elaborate machinery of lexical access, like playing an
internal filing-organ. The words and phrases that just come to us to serve our
communicative purposes would be distant goals, requiring knowledge and skill to
achieve, like an orchestra playing a symphony or a mechanic attending to an
elaborate mechanism.[14]

Hayes goes on to
say that if we were aware of all this, then:

“We would all be cast in the roles of something like servants
of our former selves, running around inside our own heads attending to the
details of the mental machinery which currently
is so conveniently hidden from our view, leaving us time to attend to more
important matters. Why be in the engine room if we can be on the bridge?”

In this paradoxical view,
consciousness still seems marvelous—but not because it tells us so much, but
for protecting us from such tedious stuff! Here is another description of
this, from section 6.1 of The Society of Mind.

Consider how a driver guides the immense momentum of a car, not
knowing how its engine works or how its steering wheel turns it left or right.
Yet when one comes to think of it, we drive our bodies, cars, and minds in very
similar ways. So far as conscious thought is concerned, you steer yourself in
much the same way; you merely choose your new direction, and all the rest takes
care of itself. This incredible process involves a huge society of muscles,
bones, and joints, all controlled by hundreds of interacting programs that even
specialists don't yet understand. Yet all you think is "Turn that
way," and your wish is automatically fulfilled.

And when you come to think about it, it scarcely could be
otherwise! What would happen if we were forced to perceive the trillions of
circuits in our brains? Scientists have peered at these for a hundred years—yet
still know little of how they work. Fortunately, in everyday life, we only need
to know what they achieve! Consider that you can scarcely see a hammer except
as something to hit things with, or see a ball except as a thing to throw and
catch. Why do we see things, less as they are, and more with a view of how they
are used?

Similarly, whenever you play
a computer game, you control what happens inside the computer mainly by using
symbols and names. The processes we call "consciousness" do very much
the same. It’s as though the higher levels of our minds sit at mental
terminals, steering great engines in our brains, not by knowing how that
machinery works, but by ‘clicking’ on symbols from menu-lists that appear on
our mental screen-displays.

Our minds did not evolve to
serve as instruments for observing themselves, but for solving such practical
problems as nutrition, defense, and reproduction.

In
judging the development of self-consciousness, we must guard against accepting
any single symptoms, such as the child's discrimination of the parts of his
body from objects of his environment, his use of the word "I,” or even the
recognition of his own image in the mirror. … The use of the personal pronoun
is due to the child's imitation of the examples of those about him. This
imitation comes at very different times in the cases of different children,
even when their intellectual development in other respects is the same. —Wilhelm Wundt, 1897.[15]

In §4-2 we suggested that
Joan ‘made and used models of herself’—but we did not explain what we meant by amodel. We use that word in quite a few ways, as in “Charles
is a model administrator,” which
means that he is an example worthy to imitate—or in, “I’m building a model
airplane,” which means something
built on a scale smaller than that of the original. But here we’re using ‘model of X’ to mean a simplified mental representation that can help us to answer
some questions about some other, more complex thing X.

Thus, when we say that ‘Joan hasa mental model of
Charles’, we mean
that Joan possesses some mental resource that helps her answer some
questions about Charles.[16] I emphasize the word some
because each of Joan’s models will only work well on some kinds of
questions—and might give wrong answers to most other questions. Clearly the
quality of Joan’s thought will depend both on how good her models are, but on
how good are her ways to choose which model to use in each situation.

Some of Joan’s
models will have practical uses for predicting how physical actions will make
things change in the outer world. She will also have models for predicting how
mental acts will make changes in her mental state. In Chapter §9 we’ll talk
about some models that she can use to describe herself—that is, to answer some
questions about her own abilities and dispositions; these could some
descriptions of

Her various goals and ambitions.

Her professional and political views.

Her ideas about her competences,

Her ideas about her social roles.

Her various moral and ethical views.

Her
beliefs about of what sort of thing she is.

For example, she
could try to use some of these to guess whether she can rely on herself to
actually carry out a certain plan. Furthermore, this could explain some of her
ideas about consciousness. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example proposed by
the philosopher Drew McDermott.[17]

Joan is in a certain room.
She has a mental model of some of the contents in that room. One of those
objects is Joan herself

Most of those
objects will have sub-models themselves, for example to describe their
structures and functions. Joan’s model for that object “Joan’ will be a
structure that she calls “Myself,” and which includes at least two parts—one called Body and one called Mind.

By using the
various parts of this model, Joan could say ‘Yes’ if you asked her, “Do you have a mind?” But if you asked her, “Where is your
mind?” this model would
not help her to say, as some people would, “My mind is inside my head (or
my brain).”However, Joan could offer such a reply if Myself included a part-of link from Mind to Head, or a caused–by link from Mind to another part of the body called Brain.

More generally,
our answers to questions about ourselves will depend on what is in our models
of ourselves.I used models instead of model because, as we’ll see in §9, one may need
different models for different purposes. So there may be many answers to the
same questions, depending on what one wants to achieve—and those answers need
not always agree.

Drew McDermott: Few
of us even believe that we have such models, much less know that we have one.
The key idea is not that the system has a model of itself, but that it has a
model of itself as conscious.” —comp.ai.philosophy, 7 Feb 1992.

What if we were
to ask of Joan, “Were you conscious of what you just did, and why?”

However, those
descriptions don't have to be correct, but they are not likely to persist if
they never do anything useful for us.)

If Joan has good models of
how she makes choices, then she may feel that she has some 'control' over
these—and then perhaps use the name 'conscious decisions' for them. As for
activities for which she has no good models, she may categorize these as beyond
her control and call them 'unconscious' or ‘unintentional’. Or alternatively, she may take the view that she’s still
in control, and makes some decisions by using ‘free will’ — which translates, despite what she might actually say,
into, “I have no good theory of what made me do that.”

So, when Joan
says, "I made a conscious decision", that need not mean that some magical
thing has happened; she attributes her thoughts to various parts of her most useful
models.

“We
can see that the mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous
possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each
other, the selection of some, and the suppression of others, of the rest, by
the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most
celebrated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty
below that…in turn sifted from a still larger amount of simpler material, and
so on.” —William James [].

We
sometimes think of the work of the mind as like a drama performed on a
theater's stage. Thus Joan may sometimes imagine herself as watching from a
front row seat while the ‘things on her mind’ act out the play. One of the
characters is that pain in her knee (§3-5), which has just moved to center
stage. Soon, Joan hears a voice in her mind that says, "I'll have to do something about
this pain. It keeps me from getting anything done.”

Now, as
soon as Joan starts to think that way—about how she feels, and about what she
might do—then Joan herself takes a place on that stage. But in order to hear
what she says to herself, she must also remain in the audience. So now we have
two copies of Joan—the actor, and her audience!

When we look further behind that stage, more versions of Joan
begin to emerge. There must be a Writer-Joan to script the plot and a
Designer-Joan to arrange the scenes. There must be other Joans in the wings,
to manage the curtains, lights, and sounds. We need a Director-Joan to stage
the play—and we need a Critic-Joan to complain, "I just can’t endure
any more of this pain!”

However,
when we look closely at this theatrical view, we see that it provides no
answers, but only raises additional questions. When Critic-Joan complains about
pain, how does she relate to the Joan-on-the-stage? Does each of those
actresses need her own theater, each with its own one-woman show? Of course no
such theater really exists, and those Joan-things are not people like us; they
are only different models that Joan has constructed as ways to represent
herself in various kinds on contexts. In many cases, those models are much like
cartoons or caricatures— and in yet other cases, they are downright wrong.
Still, Joan’s mind abounds with varied self-models—Joans past, Joans present
and future Joans; some represent remnants of previous Joans, while others
describe what she hopes to become; there are sexual Joans and social Joans,
athletic and mathematical Joans, musical and political Joans, and various kinds
of professional Joans—and because of their different interests, we shouldn’t
expect them to all ‘get along’. We’ll discuss this more in §9-X.

Why would Joan model herself this way? The mind is a maze of
processes, few of which we understand. And whenever there's something we don't
comprehend, we try to represent it in familiar ways—and nothing is more
familiar to us than the ways that objects work in space. So it's easy for us
to imagine a place for the processes that we use when we think—and it certainly
seems that many people do indeed construct such models. Daniel Dennett has
named this “The Cartesian Theater.”[18]

Why is this image so popular! To begin with, it doesn’t explain
very much—but it’s better than the simpler idea that all thinking is done by a
Single Self. It recognizes that minds have parts, and that these may need to
interact—and that theater serves as a metaphor for a 'place' in which those
processes can work and communicate. For example, if different resources were
to propose plans for what Joan should do, then this idea of a theater-like
stage suggests that they could settle their arguments in some kind of communal
working-place. Thus Joan’s Cartesian Theater lets her use many familiar real-world
skills by providing
locations in space and time to represent the things ‘on her mind.’ So this
could give her a way to start to reflect on how she makes those decisions.

Why do we find this metaphor to be so plausible and natural?
Perhaps this ability to ‘simulatea spatial world inside the mind’ was
one of the early seeds or catalysts that led our ancestors to be able to
self-reflect. [(There is some evidence that some other animals’ brains develop
map-like representations of environments they’re familiar with.) In any case,
such metaphors now permeate our language and thought; imagine how hard it would
be to think without our thousands of concepts like, “I’m getter closer to my
goal.” Space-related models are so useful in our everyday lives, and we
have such powerful skills for using them, that it would seem that almost always
engaging them.[19]

However,
perhaps we’ve carried this too far, and the concept of a Cartesian Theater is
now become an obstacle in the path toward further insights into psychology
minds.[20] For example, we
have to recognize that a theatrical stage is merely a front, which conceals
what’s happening in the wings; the processes behind the scenes are concealed
inside the minds of the cast. What dictates what appears in the play—that is,
chooses which subjects will interest us? How does Joan actually make her
decisions? How could such a model represent comparing two different, possible
‘future worlds’ without maintaining two theaters at once?

The theatrical image, by
itself, does not help us answer questions like these because it delegates too
much intelligence to that Joan who observes from the audience. However, we see
a better way to deal with this in the Global
Workspace view proposed by Bernard Baars and
James Newman, in which,

“The theater becomes a workspace to which the entire audience
of "experts" has potential access … Awareness, at any moment,
corresponds to the pattern of activity produced by the then most active
coalition of experts, or modular processors. … At any one moment, some may be
dozing in their seats, others busy on stage … [but] each can potentially
contribute to the direction the play takes. … Each expert has a "vote",
and by forming coalitions with other experts can contribute to deciding which
inputs receive immediate attention and which are "sent back to
committee". Most of the work of this deliberative body is done outside
the workspace (i.e., non- consciously). Only matters of central import gain
access to center stage. [21]

Those two final sentences warn us to not attribute too much to
some compact self or ‘homunculus’—a
miniature person inside the mind—who actually does all the hard mental work; instead we have to
distribute the work. For as Daniel Dennett has said,

"Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the
talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of
relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent
behaviour of the whole, this is progress."— in Brainstorms 1978, p. 123.

The
truth is, that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and
anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief,
love and hatred, hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the
cause must have been before the effect...—Samuel Johnson

The world of subjective
experience seems perfectly continuous. We feel that we're living here and now,
moving steadily into the future. Yet whenever we use the present tense, we're
under a misconception, as we noted in §4-2: We can know about things that
we've recently done, but have no way to know what we're doing ‘right now.’

Citizen:
Ridiculous. Of course I know what I’m doing right now—and thinking now, and
feeling now. How do your theories explain why I sense a continuous stream of
consciousness?

While the stories that we
tell ourselves may seem to run in ‘real time,’ what actually happens must be
more complex. To construct them, some resources must zigzag through memories;
they sometimes look back to old goals and regrets, to assess our progress on
previous plans.

Dennett
and Kinsbourne: “[Remembered events] are distributed in both space and time in
the brain. These events do have temporal properties, but those properties do
not determine subjective order, because there is no single, definitive ‘stream
of consciousness,’ only a parallel stream of conflicting and continuously
revised contents. The temporal order of subjective events is a product of the
brain's interpretational processes, not a direct reflection of events making up
those processes.”[22]

Also, it seems safe to assume
that different parts of your mind proceed at substantially different speeds,
and with varied delays.[23]
So if you try to recount your recent thoughts a serial storylike tale about,
your narrative machinery will somehow have to pick and choose, in retrospect,
from various parts of those multiple streams. Furthermore, some of those
processes look ahead in time, to
expect or to anticipate events that are depicted by the ‘predicting machines’
that we’ll describe in §5-9. This means that the ‘contents of your
consciousness’ are involved not only with ideas about the past but about your
possible futures.

So the one thing you cannot
be conscious of is what your mind is doing ‘right now’—because each
brain-resource can know at best only what some others were doing some moments
ago.

Citizen:
I agree that much of what we think must be based on records of prior events.
But I still feel there's something more than that, which makes which makes it
so hard for use to describe our minds.

HAL-2023:
Perhaps such things seem mysterious because your human short-term memories are
so small that, when you try to review your recent thoughts, you are forced to
replace the data you find by records of what you are doing right now. So you
are constantly erasing the data you need for what you were trying to explain.

Citizen:
I think I understand what you mean, because I sometimes get two good ideas at
once—but, whichever one I write down first, the other leaves only a very faint
trace. I presume that this must happen because I just don’t have enough room
to store both of them. But wouldn't that also apply to machines?

HAL:
No; that does not apply to apply to me because my
designers equipped me with a way to store snapshots of my entire state in special
"backtrace" memory banks. Later, if anything goes wrong, then I can see just what
my programs have done—so that I can then proceed to debug myself.

Citizen:
Is that what makes you so intelligent?

HAL: Only incidentally. Although those records could make me
more "self-aware" than any person ever could be, they don’t
contribute much to my quality, because I only use them in emergencies. Interpreting
them is so tedious that it makes my mind run sluggishly, so I only stop to
dwell on them when I sense that I have not been thinking well. I often hear people say
things like, “I am trying to get in touch with myself.” However, take
my word for it; they would not improve much by doing that.

Many thinkers
have maintained that even after we learn all about how our brain-functions
work, one basic question may always remain: “Why do we experience” things?” Here is one philosopher who has argued
explaining ‘subjective experience’ could be the hardest problem of
psychology—and possibly one that no one will ever solve.

David Chalmers: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems
engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or
auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How
can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image,
or to experience an emotion? … Why should physical processing give rise to a
rich inner life at all? ... The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be
derived from physical theory.”[24]

It appears to me
that Chalmers assumes that experiencing is quite plain and direct—and therefore deserves some sort
of simple, compact explanation. However, once we recognize that each of our
everyday psychology words (like experience, feeling, and consciousness) refers to a suitcase of different
phenomena, then we should no longer expect to find and single way to explain
all the contents of that suitcase-word. Instead, we first will need to make
theories about each of those different phenomena. Then we may be able to see
that some subsets of them share some useful similarities. But until we have
made the right kinds of dissections, it would be rash to conclude that what
they describe cannot be ‘derived’ from other ideas. [See §§Emergence.]

Physicist: Perhaps brains exploit some unknown laws that cannot
be built into machinery. For
example, we don’t really know how gravity works—so consciousness might be an
aspect of that.[25]

This too assumes what it’s trying to prove—that there must be a
single source or cause for all the marvels of ‘consciousness’. But as we saw
in §4-2, consciousness
has more meanings than can be explained in any single or uniform way.

Essentialist: What about the basic fact that consciousness
makes me aware of myself? It tells me what I am thinking about, and this is
how I know I exist Computers compute without any such sense, but whenever a
person feels or thinks, this come with that sense of ‘experience’—and nothing
else is more basic than this.

Chapter §9 will
argue that it is a mistake to suppose that you are ‘aware of yourself’—except
in a very coarse everyday sense Instead, you are constantly switching among
different ‘self-models’ that you have composed—and each of these is based on
different, incomplete set of incomplete evidence. “Experience” may seem quite
clear and direct—but frequently it’s just plain incorrect, because each of your
various views of yourself may be partly based on oversights, or other varieties
of mistakes.

Whenever you look
at somebody else, you can see their appearance, but not what's inside it. It’s
the same when you look at yourself in a mirror; you only see what lies outside
of your skin. Now, in the popular view of consciousness, you also possess some
magical trick with which you can look at yourself from inside, and thus see directly into your own
mind. But when you reflect on this more carefully you’ll see that your
‘privileged access’ to your own thoughts may sometimes be less accurate than
are the ‘insights’ of your intimate friends. (See §9-X.)

Citizen: That claim is so ridiculous that it makes me annoyed
with what you said—and I know this in some special way that directly from
inside myself, to tell me exactly what I think.

Your friends, too, can see
that you are disturbed—and yourconsciousness fails to tell you details about why those words made you feel annoyed, or to shake your head
that particular way, what caused you to use those particular words to say annoyed instead of disturbed? True, we can't see much of a person's thoughts by
observing their actions from outside—but even when we 'watch from inside,’ it
is hard to be sure that we really see more, in view of how often such ‘insights’
are wrong. So, if we take ‘consciousness’ to mean 'aware of our internal
processes'—it doesn't live up to its
reputation.

"The
most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind
to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the
midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage
far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed
us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open
up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein,
that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age."—H.P. Lovecraft, "The
Call of Cthulhu"

---Socrates:
Imagine men living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the
light—but the men have been chained from their childhood so that they never can
turn their heads around and can
only look toward the back of the cave. Far behind
them, outside the cave, a fire is blazing, and between the fire and the
prisoners there is a low wall built along the way, like the screen, which
puppeteers have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
---Glaucon: I see.
---Socrates: And do you see men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of
vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood, stone, and various
materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
---Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image …
---Socrates: Like us, they see nothing but only the shadows of themselves and
of those other objects, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave…
Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else
than those shadows...—Plato, in The Republic

Can you think about what you are thinking right now? Well, in a literal sense, that’s impossible—that each such
thought would change what you're thinking now. However, you can settle for
something slightly less—if you imagine that your brain (or mind) is composed of
two principal parts: Let’s call these your A-brain and B-Brain.

Now suppose that your A-Brain gets signals that stream from
such organs as eyes, ears, nose, and skin; then it can use those signals to
discern some events that occur in the external world—and then it can react to
these, by sending signals that make your muscles move—which in turn can affect the state of the world. By itself, it’s a separate animal.

However, your B-Brain has no such external sensors, but only
gets signals that come from A. So B cannot 'see' any actual things; it can
only see A's descriptions of them. Like a prisoner
in Plato’s cave, who sees only shadows on that wall, the B-brain mistakes A’s
descriptions for real things, not knowing what they might actually mean. What
the B-Brain sees as its 'outer world' are only events
in the A-brain itself.

Neurologist: And that also applies to you and me. For,
whatever you think you touch or see, the higher levels of your brain never can
actually contact these—but can only interpret the representations of them that
your other resources construct for you.

When
the fingertips of two ardent lovers come into intimate physical
contact, no one would claim that this, by itself, has any special significance.
For there is no sense in those signals themselves: their meanings to each
lover lies in each one’s representations of the other
one’s mind. .[26]
Nevertheless, although the B-Brain cannotdirectly perform a physical act, it still could affect the
external world, albeit indirectly—by sending signals that change how A will
react. For
example, if A gets stuck at repeating itself, it might suffice for B just to
interrupt.

Student: Like when I've misplaced my
spectacles, I tend to keep seeking it on the same shelf. Then a silent voice
reproaches me, suggesting that I look somewhere else.

In the ideal case, B could tell (or
teach) A exactly what it ought to do. But even if B does not have such specific
advice, it might not need to tell A what to do; it may
suffice only to criticize the strategy A is using now.

Student: But what
if I were walking across a road, when suddenly my B-brain said “Sir, you’ve
repeated the same actions with your leg for more than a dozen consecutive
times. You should stop right now and do something else.”

Indeed, that could cause a serious accident. To prevent such mistakes a B-Brain must have
appropriate ways to represent things. This accident would not occur if B
represent ‘walking to a certain place’ as a single extended act—as
in “Keep moving your legs till you’ve crossed that street”—or in terms of progress toward
some goal—as in, ‘keep reducing the remaining distance.’ Thus, a B-brain could act
like a manager who has no special expertise about how to do any particular
job—but still can give ‘general’ guidance like these.

If A's descriptions seem too vague, B tells it to
use more specific details.
If A is buried in too much detail, B suggests more abstract descriptions.
If what A is doing is taking too long, B tells it try some other technique.

How
could a B-Brain acquire such skills? Some could be built into it from the
start, but it should also be able to learn new techniques. To do this, a B-Brain itself may need help, which in turn
could come from yet another level. Then while
the B-Brain deals with its A-Brain world, that ‘C-Brain’ in turn will supervise
B.

Student: How many levels does a
person need? Do we have dozens or hundreds of them?

In
Chapter §5 we’ll describe a model of mind whose resources are organized into of
six different levels of processes. Here is an outline of what these might be:
It begins with a set of instinctive
reactions with which we are equipped
with from birth. Then we become able to reason, imagine, and plan ahead, by
developing ways to do what we call deliberative thinking. Yet later we develop ways to do “reflective
thinking” about our own thoughts.—and
still later we learn ways to self-reflect about why and how we could think about such things. Finally we start
to think self-consciously about
whether we ought to have done
those things. Here is how that scheme might apply to Joan’s thoughts about
that street-crossing scene:

What
caused Joan to turn toward that sound? [Instinctive reactions.]
How did she know that it might be a car? [Learned Reaction]
What resources were used to make her decision? [Deliberation.]
How did she choose how to make her decisions? [Reflection]
Why did she think of herself as making that choice? [Self-reflection.]
Did her actions live up to her principles? [Self-Conscious Reflection.]

Of course, this is oversimplified. Such levels can
never be clearly defined—because, at least in later life, each of those types
of processes may use resources at other levels of thought. However, this
framework will help us to start to discuss the kinds of resources that adults
use—and some ways that these might be organized.

Student: Why should there be any
‘levels’ at all—instead of just one large, cross-connected cloud or resources?

Our general argument for this is based on the idea that, to
evolve complex systems that still are efficient, every process of evolution
must find a compromise between these two alternatives:

If a system’s parts have too
few interconnections, then its abilities will be limited.

But if there are too many
connections, then each
change will disrupt too
many processes.

How to achieve a
good balance of these? A system could start with clearly distinctive parts
(for example, with more-or-less
separate layers) and then proceed to make
connections.

Embryologist:In
its embryonic development, a typical structure in the brain starts out with
more or less definite layers or levels like those in your A, B, C diagrams.
But then, various groups of cells grow bundles of fibers that extend across
those boundaries to many other quite distant places.

Or, the system could begin with too many connections and then
proceed to remove some of them. Indeed, this also happened to us: during the eons through which our brains evolved, our ancestors
had to adapt to thousands of different environments—and,
every time this happened to us, some features that formerly had been
‘good’ now came to function as serious ‘bugs’—and we had to evolve corrections
for them.

Embryologist: Indeed, it turns out that more than half of those
cells proceed to die as soon as they’ve reached their targets. These massacres
appear to be a series of post-editing’ stages in which various kinds of ‘bugs’
get corrected.

This reflects a basic constraint on
evolution: it is dangerous to make changes to the older parts of an animal,
because many parts that later evolved depend on how the older ones work.
Consequently, at every new stage, we tend to evolve by adding ‘patches’ to
structures that are already established. This led to our massively intricate
brains, in which each part works in accord with some principles, each of which
has many exceptions to it. This complexity is
reflected in human Psychology: where each aspect of thinking can be partly
explained in terms of neat laws and principles—but each such ‘law’ has
exceptions to it.

.

The same
constraints appear to apply whenever we try to improve the performance of any
large system—such as an existing computer program—by adding more fixes and
patches on top, instead of revising the older parts. Each particular ‘ bug’
that we remedy may eventually lead to more such bugs, and the system keeps
growing more ponderous—and this seems to apply to our present-day minds.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

This chapter
began by presenting a few widely held views of what “consciousness” is. We concluded that people use that
word for a great suitcase of mental processes that no one yet thoroughly
understands. The term ‘conscious’ is useful enough in everyday life—and seems
almost indispensable for talking on social or ethical levels—because it keeps
us from being distracted by wanting to know what’s inside our minds. It is the
same for most other psychology-words, such as understanding, emotion, and
feeling.

However,
when we don’t recognize that we are using suitcase-words, then we may fall into
the trap of trying to clearly define what those kinds of words ‘mean.’ Then we
get into trouble because we do not have clear enough ideas about what our minds
are and how their parts work. So, if we want to understand the things that
human minds actually do, we will
have to dissect our mental processes into parts that we can analyze. The
following chapter will try to explain how Joan’s mind could do some of the
sorts of the things that people can
do.

[7]
There are important exceptions to this. It would seem that experts like J.S.
Bach developed ways to accomplish more multiple, yet still similar goals in
parallel. However, as their skills improve, most such experts become less and
less able to tell the rest of us how they do them.

[9]
So, despite a popular intuition, research on parallel processing has shown that
such systems are frequently prone to end up accomplishing less for the same
amount of computational power Nevertheless, if that cost can be borne, then the
final result may come sooner!

[12]
Chapter §8 will propose more details about how our
memory structures are organized to so swiftly deliver such information.
Basically, when a problem arises, some processes may start to solve it before other
processes formulate questions about it.

[20]
I don’t think modern programming, on the whole, has reached this stage.
Indeed, I did once suggest, very long ago, that a Cartesian Theater concept be
a good model of programming. Old design paper]